Most reviews (including my own) of anything Mories-related trip over themselves to mention all the different projects he’s birthed or lent a hand to. While normally I’d lampoon this constant reminder of the man’s profligacy, I’m going to go ahead and hitch myself to that little red journalistic wagon as well. Few artists work at such consistent levels of quality and under so many pseudonyms that the very mention of their name is a byword for “quality harsh and heavy music” (if such a thing can realistically exist). It is in part because of, rather than in spite of, these multiple noms de guerre that his consistency is so enthralling.
Nekrasov has been plying the fetid waters of his own brand of blacked-out noise insanity since “Into the No-Mans-Sphere of the Ancient Days” appeared in 2007. Much like Mories’ output, Nekrasov’s sound is highly idiosyncratic, a blend of HNW sandwiched between sharp-edged slabs of basement riffs that, while pulling from two well-established genres, manages to combine them into something distinctly, brutally mind-flaying.
Mors Sonat largely eschews the watermark sound of it’s two creators. Both Nekrasov and Mories’ most prominent project, Gnaw Their Tongues, dwells in a blasted no-man’s land of harsh noise, angular black metal, and ambient formlessness. One would generally expect a collaborative effort from the pair to also be some form of noisy, difficult, black metal-centered insanity. Hence my surprise when the album turned out to be anything but. Instead, “Comforts In Atrocity” unreels itself as a fine sheen of sound that whirls between two equally extreme poles without ever settling.
The disquieting cello and bone-rattle opening of “Holy Holy Holy Nil” segues into a drenching pit of white noise, garbled demon shrieks, and oddly harmonic feedback squalls that rhythmically rise and fall against a structure of noise that grows continually more abrasive until it’s abrupt end around the 9.5 minute mark. Being dropped from that fuzzed haze of noise wall to sudden silence is disconcerting, and I never find myself unaffected by the change. It’s a brilliant play by the artists to affect the listener psychologically. “Sanctuary In Soil” and “The Vengeance Of Embrace” are layer cakes of brittle electronic ruffles and throbbing bass drifts backed with otherworldly vocals. They set the stage for “Comforts In Atrocity” and “The Sweet Long Legs Of Hate”, which are more ambient and graceful. The thrumming piano and string punctuation of the latter mark it as the most diabolical and melodic track on “Comforts”. By contrast, closer “So Shall I Weep In Liberation Within The Ecstasy Of Decay” is a monolithic burst of feedback and indecipherable vocal noise that ends the album on an overpowering note.
Where Mors Sonat deviates from the aesthetic of its two individual creators is where it shines. If I had turned this album on and been able to point at any one sound and say “That’s a Mories section. Oh, that’s totally Nekrasov”, I would have been broadly disappointed. Instead, “Comforts In Atrocity” stands as a finely crafted free-standing structure of harsh noise and dark ambient that manages to maintain a degree of melodicism and melodrama.
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